Monday, July 28, 2014

We love and hate them, but we can't escape them either - we're all obliged to live and work in buildings, and we all have strong feelings about how they look, how they function, and how they affect us.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Countries like Sweden have taken ambitious, holistic steps to improve traffic safety and save lives through an initiative called Vision Zero, a road safety framework that asserts that “no loss of life is morally acceptable.” The concept has spread to places such as New York City, where newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned and has adopted the approach. Both Sweden and New York City’s strategies are advanced for two reasons, the first being that they set clear targets. Research has revealed that setting ambitious road safety targets can help motivate stakeholders to improve road safety. Secondly, these policies shift the responsibility for road safety from only personal actions like wearing seat belts and helmets to a shared responsibility between road users and designers, which means also creating safer pedestrian infrastructure, automated enforcement, and reducing driving speeds. Together, these ideas can drastically change how countries and cities around the globe approach traffic safety. Read more: Urban Road Safety and Overall Goals | Sustainable Cities Collective

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Why is Vancouver a place where developments increasingly spark conflicts, where frustrated developers must gamble millions of dollars on projects before knowing if they will meet city approval, and where developer money floods the political system? Is that just the way modern cities operate, or is there something unusual about Vancouver? Read more: The Tyee – Vancouver's 'Spot Zoning' Is Corrupting Its Soul

Sunday, July 20, 2014

The past decade has seen the demise of hundreds of shopping centers and malls. Out of roughly 1,000 enclosed malls in the US, approximately 30% are dead or dying. In places of weak recovery and population loss, malls may languish for years, negatively impacting the surrounding suburban communities.

Malls are sprawl types that are normative and repetitive, and the tools for their repair can be the same. In places of economic and population growth, malls will be retrofitted into urban cores with multiple uses: offices, residential, live-work units, and hotels that will rebalance the existing retail space.

Municipalities, developers and planners need new ways to utilize and adapt such underperforming commercial properties. Having already outlived their lifecycles, these properties can provide inexpensive space for business incubation and/or affordable housing that has become scarce in recent years, as downtowns and inner-city neighborhoods have experienced a redevelopment renaissance. Read more: Lean Sprawl Repair – Mall Retrofit | Lean Urbanism

More roads or cheaper-to-use roads — ones without tolls, for example — lead to less productivity, not more, a recent study concludes. If you think this sounds paradoxical, so does the study’s author, Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Institute. But he also offers several reasons why it’s so.

For one thing, decisions to build roads or subsidize them by not charging users tends to come at the expense of other access options, things such as densification so people need not travel so far, or transit that provides more bang for the buck. These kinds of decisions are often based on politics, thus defying efficient market principles and undermining productivity. Read more: Don Cayo: Congestion may signify better productivity, not worse

Jane Jacobs, a woman akin to the patron saint of urban planners, first argued 50 years ago that healthy neighborhoods need old buildings. Aging, creaky, faded, "charming" buildings. Retired couples and young families need the cheap rent they promise. Small businesses need the cramped offices they contain. Streets need the diversity created not just when different people coexist, but when buildings of varying vintage do, too. "Cities need old buildings so badly," Jacobs wrote in her classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," "it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.” More here: An economic defense of old buildings

Several months ago I posted a chart in which I calculated the proportion of land given over to buildable space, right-of-ways and park space for each of 22 cities, or city neighborhoods. In response, one commenter suggested that I perform the same exercise with off-street parking included as a separate category. Although the work of Chris McCahill, which I featured last week, does just this for a number of cities, another commenter directed me to this thread at Skyscraper Page, where a number of people have mapped surface parking lots for several American cities. I'd like to feature three of those here (which I've further edited to show parking structures and park space), while adding one of my own. No guarantee of perfect accuracy is given. Red shows surface parking, yellow shows above-ground parking garages, and green shows park space: More at: Old Urbanist: We Are the 25%: Looking at Street Area Percentages and Surface Parking

Triumph of the City — How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier / Edward Glaeser

Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong / Alan Broadbent

Urban Planning For Dummies / Jordan Yin

Walkable City — How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time / Jeff Speck

Walking Home — The Life and Lessons of a City Builder / Ken Greenberg

Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — Oil and the End of Globalization / Jeff Rubin

Wrestling with Moses : How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City / Anthony Flint

[The motorcar] exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highway till the open road seemed to become non-stop cities... Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbours became strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run.

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[An abridged excerpt from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs]

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with improvisations.

The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)…

The heart-of-the-day ballet I seldom see, because part of the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks.

Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, shuts up his shop for a while and goes to exchange the time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters the luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts a compliment on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming.

As darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes on under lights, eddying back and forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza dispensary, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop.

Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless something calls them together, like the bagpipe. Who the piper was and why he favored our street I have no idea. The bagpipe just skirled out in the February night, and as if it were a signal the random, dwindled movements of the sidewalk took on direction.

When he finished and vanished, the dancers and watchers applauded, and applause came from the galleries, too, half a dozen of the hundred windows on Hudson Street. Then the windows closed, and the little crowd dissolved into the random movements of the night street.

I have made the daily ballet of Hudson Street sound more frenetic than it is, because writing telescopes it. In real life, it is not that way. In real life, to be sure, something is always going on, the ballet is never at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even leisurely. People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is. I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads — like the old prints of rhinoceroses from travelers' descriptions of rhinoceroses.